


Such Things Come in Threes

by sanerontheinside



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, The Force is apparently sentient, and general weirdness, sentient!Force, things I was not expecting to write, this was fun tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-26 23:59:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9934988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanerontheinside/pseuds/sanerontheinside
Summary: The Force is sentient, old, and kind of bored.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [peskylilcritter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peskylilcritter/gifts).



> Prompted by peskylilcritter on tumblr: 'Such Things Come in Threes'.
> 
> Alternatively titled:   
> **Weird Eldritch Shit,** or:   
> **Three Times the Force Said, _Fuck This_**

The Jedi and the Sith have their Codes and their little Laws and Rules and all sorts of Truths they abide by. A Code, they think, can rule their lives, and there’s no use praying to the Force, because the Force is not sentient and does not hear.

Jedi and Sith also don’t like being told they are wrong. But they are, they are so very wrong, so very limited in their understanding of the Force that it’s almost embarrassing.

The Force is _everything._ Fire and ice, atmosphere and earth and oceans and the vacuum of space. The space between systems, the burning gases and pressed minerals of stars and black holes. Every living and every nonliving thing.

It’s also a great big cosmic power, and It gets a bit bored.

The restrictions the Jedi and Sith have imposed upon themselves over the years are _boring._ If a cosmic being could possibly understand what numbness felt like, then for the last two or three relative seconds of Its existence, the Force has literally been considering juggling planets out of sheer frustration.

The trouble with being an infinite-spanning, infinitely powerful, and utterly omnipotent, omnipresent being, is that One gets terribly bored. The reality is, the Force is perhaps not quite sentient, but also not entirely self-aware. It relies on _other_ beings to discover Its own potential. The more pressing difficulty is that for the last several centuries, instead of experimenting, the Jedi seemed to have been forgetting things, which is possibly more frustrating than stagnation.

Though of course there are the Baneite Sith, but as far as the Force is concerned, It never quite understood the concept of _pain_ and utterly unnatural contortion until that lot’s most recent inventions shifted from theory to practice. Which is precisely why, when Plagueis the self-styled Wise decides to meddle with the laws of everything considered natural, the Force makes Its own choice—or, that is to say, leaves the choice up to the life Plagueis creates. The fact that this life comes into being very far from Plagueis indeed, and far out of the reach of any influence, is not—strictly speaking—interference. (All right, so it is.)

Let it not be said that Choice is an alien concept to the Force. The basis of all the experimentation, the new and subtle bends and turns, brilliant explosions, marvels and accidents of evolution—all of that is not up to the Force itself. The greatest discoveries are not those It nudges beings into (though sometimes it’s like a breath of fresh air, directing someone to uncover a buried bit of history). But pressed against the proverbial wall by a skilled and horribly stealthy, tiny, insignificant poisonous speck of a being, the Force rears up in offence. It discovers, rather late, that someone has laid a rather alarming network of seemingly irrelevant possibilities, and the potential outcomes from that set of threads is very, very alarming.

For the first time in a very long time of Its own existence, Force takes liberties in ways It had long ago determined It should not.

Here is something that the Sith and the Jedi long forgot, that the Force is not all that eager for anyone to remember: there were times, in the history of being, when the Force was neither so kind nor so distant. When, like a young thing, It treated lesser beings without proper knowledge of their boundaries, and broke some, bruised others, irretrievably damaged quite a bit. The Force needed time to learn. In the end, perhaps, while Morality is something that yet escapes it (and, honestly, most sentient beings, at that), Choice was a lesson painfully driven home.

Ultimately, a particularly painful lesson was that interference almost always leads to disaster. But right now, the Force feels poised on the cusp of disaster as It is, and making a move is the only way to break the stalemate.

For the first time in all Its memory, the Force unashamedly panics. (Non-sentient beings do not panic. Unencompassable, undefined, _indefinable_ abstract concepts do not— _cannot_ —panic, and yet nevertheless the Force does. Quite successfully, at that.) This cosmic angst will definitely send lesser beings into a tailspin, seeding minor conflicts among individuals which, frankly, It hasn’t the extent of empathy to care for. Not now, when acting in self defence.

(Though that’s usually a good reason to not fucking panic, even if you are an unencompassable abstract concept.)

Yet again the Force is reminded of just how much the Jedi forgot. _The boy will not be trained,_ the Council says, as though the Council hadn’t heard the Force all but screaming in desperate vibrations in the very center of their sunset-flooded, mosaic-tiled chamber. _Honestly,_ even the one called Jinn has a headache, or a week-long migraine really, and Jinn was not so long ago responsible for an equivalent of a migraine for the Force itself.

But Kenobi—for all his trust in the Council—Kenobi is interesting. Kenobi sees possibilities, potentials. It’s helpful, in a strange way, for someone else to view and understand them, and make choices based on the frankly overwhelming mass of possibilities where the Force does not permit itself to interfere. It should, now, It’s done so with Its own child, but Kenobi is one being of a select few who might be able to make the choice that will derail everything, given the chance and the right kind of hint.

Ultimately, though, over centuries—over _millenia_ —there are still times when Choice is not enough.

But sometimes, and only sometimes, stubborn faith and a last-ditch desperate plea filled with all the belief that a soul can muster, can in fact hold more power than Choice.

_Force, please, don’t let him die. Not like this. Not here._

Over the years, many a being has either joked or earnestly believed that the Force either laughed at them, or favoured them, or thought them idiots (which, to be fair, they mostly were). But on Naboo, feeling the tightening of the crucial strand in a well-laid web, the Force might actually have discovered the definition of ‘fuck it’. (Some argument could be made for the origin of Hsiss, but that was a highly stressful situation involving new ways of dealing with Darkness and Wellsprings, not a feeling of total impending doom.) If gravity had turned off in that generator complex, things might have actually seemed less weird. 

The Force reaches for the one who called for it, called for help, and embraces him, and—well. While the Force Itself cannot actually alter the passage or perception of time, as far as the Force is concerned, Time is not actually linear, but happening all at once. And while It cannot literally transplant Master, General Kenobi into the place of the Senior Padawan, It _can_ at least give hints. After all, even the Padawan knows all the steps and the katas and forms. 

Kenobi’s eyes glow gold, like stars, and the Force is a near-tangible thing around him. There is anger in his movements, and there is the fierce, overwhelming desire to protect. He moves inhumanly fast, darts out of the way of Maul’s saberstaff. Ultimately, what breaks the Sith is the moment they make eye contact over crossed blades, and hold. 

In the end no one quite knows how to explain what actually happened. Maul ends up looking dazed on one side of the melting pit, pressing fingers carefully into his temples, and Jinn, relatively unscathed, slumps against the wall on the other. Obi-Wan stands guard at the ray shields, rather unnecessarily, glowing with light that has no physical source. Jinn’s thoughts on the matter are summed up in rather colourful language, for which Maul gives him an appreciative nod. Obi-Wan—or, perhaps, the Force—eyes the two of them, determines that they’re not about to kill each other any time soon, and collapses. 

Psychic exhaustion is a bitch, and the Force (regretfully) did not exactly account for that. Obi-Wan mostly sleeps, on and off, and more on than off, through the next week and a half. 

Maul spends that time trying to run off to kill his Master and being very steadily deterred by the Force through some very insistent hints, because _no, that would be a Very Bad Idea._ Eventually he does get the picture. He also gives the Order enough evidence to hang Palpatine-Sidious twice. It’s mildly upsetting that the Sith Master is slippery as a Dagobahn watersnake, but for once the Force doesn’t immediately regret interfering. 

  


_The real problem with interfering in things is that once you start, you can’t actually stop, not really, not without a lot of serious problems and collateral damage; and the Force is utterly rubbish at accounting for collateral damage. But that’s a story for another time._


End file.
